Just realized I missed last week’s blog.  Please depict me with Scott McCloud’s severe zigzag lines.  Puddles of ink around darkly shaded cheekbones and eye bags highlight a face in tension, which dominates the frame.  The background is busy.  What would signal my inner state of mind?  Perhaps piles of notebooks around a computer, a basket of dirty laundry and dishes that cry out for washing.  At this point, I would rather read a graphic novel. 

Nat Turner surprised me.  I did not think I would like this pictorial form of literature; I was a skeptic.  Caricatures are bound to be superficial conveyances, I thought. 

In fact, the “information density” to which Erik Rabkin refers applies to this work of art, which moved me deeply.  Images of outrage are superimposed upon the reader’s imagination.  I cannot forget the neck irons, a busted drum, curling whips, a bawling baby tossed to sharks, and human cargo crammed into the bowels of a creaking ship.  The images reflect the “jarring combinations” that McCloud writes about.  If Kyle Baker’s narrative is not linear, historically minute or fully realized, it nevertheless arouses awareness and shocking emotional power.  A historical saga is humanized.

I refer to an NPR American Masters TV program on Philip Roth last night.  Did anyone else catch it?  At age eighty, this prolific novelist remains reflective, articulate and active.  Quoting Chekhov, Roth said that the mission of literature is the proper presentation of a problem, and not its solution.  “You invite understanding,” he said.  “And often you get it wrong.  That’s how you know you’re alive.” 

Kyle Baker’s depiction of the forces that generated a bestial insurrection may not be fully coherent.  For example, I found a disjunction between a gifted child’s ethereal piety and its transmutation into unsparing violence.  As a reader, I puzzled over this gap.  But my eyes returned again and again to the images.  Baker takes us on a journey, his variegated frames invite us into the abusive world and minds of slaves, and he makes us participate in a narrative of degradation, guilt and shame that occurred here in Virginia in our own nation.  His graphic work invites our engagement and it stimulates more questions, if not pat explanations or solutions.

 Much more compelling than laundry and dishes.